I'm really enjoying the game, but a few things are confusing and difficult. First of all, the rules state that you should place cards on the bottom of their decks, which is very tedious with the current controls. Also, the deck backs are not color matched to their respective dungeon colors on the board, which is confusing for new players. Some of the card text seems a bit broken, such as one monster doing 4 damage as well as another card giving you the option of giving up 3 damage (kills you instantly) or paying (paying is clearly the better option unless you cannot pay because killing yourself makes you lose your gold anyways).

Last night, inspired by the amazing work of the Wolfire team on Desperate Gods, and after spending what was probably a tad too much time playing Desperate Gods on Thanksgiving, I have put together an expansion ruleset called 'Dynamic Characters Ruleset' (DCR) to build on the standard rules.

This ruleset is a Work In Progress and has not been thoroughly tested. Input, suggestions, and testing results are encouraged and requested. Please be polite, though.

Introduction:

The Dynamic Characters Ruleset is an expansion of the standard ruleset which seeks to add additional tactics and character progression to the game of Desperate Gods. It does this by making characters more dynamic and defining new options for players.

The main features of DCR are new Attributes and Skills. Attributes are values that affect the outcome of D6 rolls, and Skills are new tactics that can be implemented against opponents.

Attributes are a new feature of DCR which adds progressive character attributes of the sort found in many traditional RPGs (Role-Playing Games). The attributes added are Strength, Endurance, Agility, and Intelligence.

Skills are another feature of DCR. Skills enable the player to perform new functions throughout the game to increase the amount of tactics available to players. Rather than having values that can be increased, a player only needs to train at the Town once to gain the Skill. The Skills available are Smithing, Stealth, Diversion, Mercantilism, and Magic.

In addition to these new tactics and attributes, DCR includes a character sheet which can be used to keep track of variables and keep notes.

The DRC ruleset handbook and a character sheet can be downloaded from Google below:

seiseki wrote:Can't get it to work properly with unity. The text isn't appearing and the graphics bug out when I zoom in. It's the same if I make a new build or run it in the editor.

The text doesn't appear because Unity free has a block on RenderTexture, which is used for card faces and board tile text. The bug zooming in is due to the shadow camera projecting a random texture (since shadowmaps use RenderTexture also).

Since I want to mod the Unity project too, I'm working on creating a mod system that pulls most of the art (including the board), tile text and card baking out into an external renderer (going to use blender via commandline most likely) with uncompressed art, text, and game layout / metadata.

It's taking some careful planning so far, but ideally it will be possible to add new objects, boards, cards, and game layouts to create all new games without ever having to launch Unity. All so I can do some control modding using Unity free! The downside to compiling with Unity free is there won't be any shadows, but once it's all done hopefully we could get an official build. Thinking chess would be a good example game to show off the custom piece and board layout once I have it working.

Since I don't have much done yet, it's probably too soon to advertise all this! I'm sure a more experienced programmer could do all this in a much shorter time, but I'm having fun with it as a hobby project. And I shall call it Desperate Mods.

I've made Unity load external, uncompressed data before, so I'm pretty optimistic about the whole thing. Organizationally, my ideas are starting to come together. Table layouts will be text-based, but I'll most likely create a map editing and export tool for blender (should be simple to use). I'd like to get external obj models loading in as generic pieces, or maybe even custom dice. That'd be cool.

Hi Vrav. I'm more of a design guy, although most of my experience has been in UI, so I have a lot of vision for how to open up Desperate Gods for any type of board game experience. I can pick up basic coding and modding if someone points me in the right direction (as an example, I've made some custom weapons and attack animations for Overgrowth). If you can successfully open up DG to modify without having to purchase a professional version of Unity, I would LOVE to team up with you in making new content. Send me a PM if you want to talk more.

I would personally love it if someone could make a mod for this that was built around table top RPGs like D&D. There are some good programs out there but they have some drawbacks that makes them not nearly as fun as playing the game in person. The two main problems are the inability to roll dice and the fact that you don't have a good way to represent players and enemies (Tokens just aren't the same) . Even if someone made a mod that just added the necessary dice types, the ability to import an image as a board and the ability to add extra player pieces, that would be enough to make it the best choice for anyone wanting to play D&D online.

seiseki wrote:Let me clarify..What I meant is if you want to use the tunnel you have to stop at swamp and the tunnel..Otherwise people can just skip those and go directly into hell..

And forcing people to take this route always wouldn't make any sense whatsoever because that doesn't open up more possibilities, it just makes the route shorter..

That made sense to me. Just like the town, a player can chose to stop at the tunnel entrance and then travel through it on their next turn. I like it. Maybe only open up the tunnel once all 'Tree' cards have been eliminated?